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Comment by abainbridge | Hacker News Reader

Seems like it is no longer considered to be anything to do with a meteorite impact. It's hard to find a good source. This is the best I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct...

I think this paper's abstract claims that wooden debris from the landslide has been dated to 5000 years older than the Sumerian tablet: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329153343_The_produ...

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If you're looking for a source on the landslide, another commenter here posted this, that seems more reliable than wikipedia. Searching for Kofel's impact, rather than landslide, brings up nonsense because there's only pseudo-evidence for that.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

It dates the landslide to about 9400 years ago (BP), so this article about the star map putting it at 5500 years ago seems to be a colourful fabrication (my bad). The author of the meteor theory apparently even tries to connect it to Sodom and Gomorrah being hit by the passing heat! Lol

Finding reliable info on this "planisphere" tablet isn't easy. As far as I can tell it was untranslated and kept a low profile until this impact story

>> It dates the landslide to about 9400 years ago (BP), so this article about the star map putting it at 5500 years ago seems to be a colourful fabrication (my bad).

Don't feel bad. Genuinely exciting if it were true.

Eh, so too good to be true.

Yeah, it was quite a compelling story, and it's at least a genuinely beautiful and intriguing tablet. The author Hempsell does have some talent though, in seemingly getting a reputable university to publish his book... I'm thinking he was quite canny in finding this attractive untranslated tablet with little else written about it, and then employing enough knowledge about a combination of different subjects (ancient Sumerian, asteroid orbits, Alpine geology) that no single reviewer was able or motivated to properly evaluate all the arguments. Or he just had a friend at the press.

There are true stories that don't involve asteroids but are just as compelling. Anything by Irving Finkel, such as:

https://youtu.be/LUxFzh8r384

There is software working at

- finding correspondences (solve parts of the puzzle) and reconstructing at least part of certain documents ( https://arkeonews.net/new-ai-tool-fragmentarium-brings-ancie... , https://virtualcuneiform.org/ )

- somewhat 'infering' some missing parts ( https://voices.uchicago.edu/ochre/project/deepscribe/ ),

- 'normalizing' (find the 'standard' form) of glyphs ( https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/03/ai-models-make-prec... )

Erich von Däniken comes to mind.

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